1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image processing system comprising an image scanner and a facsimile terminal, and more particularly to a controlling method therefor which will render the image scanner and facsimile terminal highly efficient and versatile.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Image processing systems are described in Japanese Unexam. Utility Model Publ. No. 50-78114, Japanese Unexam. Patent Publ. No. 58-148561, Japanese Unexam. Patent Publ. No. 62-239658 etc., wherein image signals from a television camera are input to a facsimile terminal (hereinafter called simply a fax-terminal), and are transmitted to a remote fax-terminal through a telephone line. Because fax-terminals have come into wide use recently, it would be very convenient to control an image scanner to cooperate with a fax-terminal such that it would be possible to transmit a pictorial image of a subject, such as an image of a picture written on a black or white board, by facsimile transmission immediately after picking up that image, without taking a hard copy of the image.
However, the above-mentioned prior arts merely teach to transmit image signals from an image scanner such as a television camera, solid state imaging device or the like through a facsimile communication network, and there is no particular description about how to control the image scanner and the fax-terminals in cooperation with each other.
For example, because conventional fax-terminals are so designed that the access to the telephone line is automatically cut off after transmission of a set of originals is completed, when an image of a remote subject from the imaging device should also be transmitted to the same terminal following the originals it is necessary to operate dialing buttons of the fax-terminal so as to input the address of the remote terminal once again in order to transmit the image signals of the remote subject. This is certainly cumbersome.
Furthermore, no known prior art has suggested how to control the imaging device, the fax-terminal and the access to the telephone line in the case where the images of a plurality of remote subjects should be captured to transmit image signals of these subjects in a sequential manner.
Moreover, an image processing system comprising an imaging device and an associated fax-terminal would be still more useful if it were possible to actuate the imaging device to pick up an image of a remote subject and transmit it through the associated fax-terminal in response to a polling request from a remote fax-terminal. In this way, it would become possible, for instance, to provide a simple and inexpensive monitoring system which could monitor indicators by means of a remote fax-terminal that causes an imaging device to relay images of the indicators.
However, in the conventional image processing system described above, both the image scanner and the fax-terminal must be manually and directly operated, in order to transmit an image from the image scanner by facsimile.